Rusted Car Rehab: Rust Treatment

So often, we staffers hear stories of a rusted car languishing in barns or rotting away in fields while their owners swear they will restore it one of these days. More often than not, “one of these days” never comes, and the rusted car sinks further into oblivion. Restoring a rusted car is hard work, takes a lot of time, and is very expensive. Maybe you have just such a car in your garage/barn/field, and you don’t have the resources to do a proper restoration. If so, follow our formula to kill the rust and keep the car in good shape until you can afford to do the whole job. You’d be surprised by how much you can accomplish with a gallon of good primer and a couple cans of spray paint.

Rust Treatment and Primer

Sanding the rusted car got rid of the surface rust, but we needed to coat the surface with some sort of rust treatment. We’ve tried several available on the market and really like Eastwood’s Rust Encapsulator. It penetrates deep into rusty surfaces, dries quickly, and is compatible with body filler and most urethane primers and paint. In short, it is a good foundation coating for bare metal. You can brush it on, use a roller, or spray it. It is also available in aerosol cans. Rather than spot-treating individual rusty areas on the truck, we decided to spray the whole thing with this stuff using our DeVilbiss Starting Line gun set up with a 1.3 fluid tip and 27 psi dialed into the inlet regulator. It took about a quarter-gallon to cover the truck with two coats. Prior to application, we wiped the surface with Eastwood’s PRE paint prep. We have it in
a gallon container, but you might only need a couple of aerosol cans. Rust Encapsulator dries quickly to a rich, semi-gloss black color. We were tempted to leave the truck wearing only this product, but because it is a one-component coating (meaning it dries in the air rather than needing to be mixed with an activator or hardener), it is not a durable topcoat and isn’t intended to be. It can easily be removed with solvents such as gasoline or paint thinner, so it works best as a foundation for primer and paint.

Eastwood recommends letting Rust Encapsulator dry for eight hours prior to topcoating. We let it dry overnight before spraying the truck with PCL’s black PolyPrimer. The setup on our spray gun was the same—1.3 fluid tip, 27 psi inlet pressure—and it took about two-thirds of a gallon to cover the truck in PCL’s recommended process of a light mist coat followed by two medium coats with 15 minutes flash time between the last two coats. This is a two-component coating, meaning it requires an activator or hardener for this product to cure. That’s what’s in the little squeeze bottle next to the gallon can in the inset photo. Two component coatings are generally weatherproof and will therefore protect your car from the elements. PCL’s PolyPrimer is available in a variety of colors from white to gray to red oxide. We like black and will leave the truck like this for a while.

Rust Treatment & Minor Fixes

How I Spent My Long Weekend

Compared to what we started with, the end result looks pretty good, and we really did accomplish the whole job over a long weekend, starting on a Thursday night after work, and working steadily through until Sunday. No all nighters were necessary, either. I think the latest I worked on it was 9 p.m., one night.

We pulled this off for a decent price, too. If you count only the Rust Encapsulator, paint and primer work, the total is about $1,000, and that price includes just about everything, including mixing cups, lacquer thinner, tape, and masking paper. So what did we get for our time and money? No, our project isn’t a show-stopper, but we didn’t waste any time or materials. Any future bodywork can be done on top of the primer we just sprayed. Or, if we want this to be the permanent look, we could just spray a clear coat right over the primer and call this thing done. Either way, we kept another piece of vintage iron from rotting away due to neglect.